http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLWwtp7rUYA
“dude have you heard what henry rollins said about gay marriage dude he is so right i cant believe the singer of a seminal hardcore band is brave enough to speak his mind about a totally brainless and rational issue that is already widely supported amongst people who know who he is”
“dude have you heard what revolutionary internet punk drew from brain tumors said about henry rollins he is so right i cant believe the singer of a largely unnotable hardcore band is brave enough to speak his mind about a totally brainless celebrity”
i have Greg Ginn’s phone number. i havent used it yet but i am going to. to adequately explain how much of a fuck i give, let me explain: i have been calling him Greg “Gin” for a few years now. our guitarist, Pat, sometimes gets compared to him – probably for being skinny and playing noisy guitar. he gets pissed and mutters something about Greg Sage whenever someone says that. i heard that Greg Sage is a recluse who lives with a ton of cats now. but this came from someone who talked to the old drummer from the Wipers with Don’t when they came through.
alright, i’m going to post this video where the soundtrack is Wesley Willis covering Duran Duran and get on with it. hopefully you are lucky enough to get an advertisement for Olive Garden before viewing it – which just seems to work perfectly together. a dead genius tormented by schizophrenia and all the salad and breadsticks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVSv9sFz38E
alright, well, i wrote some of this shit back when i was feeling good about life but now i am feeling bad about it again. so the rest of this will be uneven. and i just interviewed Marilyn Manson. this is not a joke, people. he was drunk and i could hardly understand him but he said some bullshit about Gucci Mane.
we woke up at Max’s looking like fat italians in shitty hooded sweatshirts that turned blue after attempting to dye them black. or maybe that was just me. i found a jumprope.
we unloaded and then drove out of chicago.
then we broke down after trying to get gas at a place called Chesterville. i don’t know what state it’s in and i’m not going to look it up, but if you are from Chesterville, congratulations, you got mentioned in some band’s shitty blog.
as we sat, stalled at a light, we all hopped out and collectively pushed the van. it is the most physical thing we have done as a band other than hurt each other during shows. a man jumped out of a Dodge Charger, a car i always regard the owners of to be jock pieces of shit, and ran up to help us. he helped us push the van into a Burger King parking lot where i saw a woman wearing a jean jacket with a White Zombie backpatch. the man who helped us push the van was named Kevin. the Burger King was playing country western music. at a table, a woman was teaching a man how to read.
we waited for a while and then Perfect Patrick started the van back up. we drove through a light rain, listening to the windshield wipers squeak and squawk while Frank Black squeaked and squawked along with the rest of The Pixies, a band that is better than Sonic Youth.
we stopped at a gas station which displayed an extremely racist message in the front – although i believe this message was not displayed intentionally. the racist message was actually a result of the racist purchasing habits of the members of Michigan, a state i believe to be full of racist due to the abundance of trees. but if you’ll look here at the photo, you will see a bunch of black dolls hanging in the storefront window. there is one white doll, but that is simply because someone has not purchased the last white doll. in time, there will only be black dolls hanging.
but really, lets just ask the question of “why the fuck do we sell people dolls at the fucking gas station,” and leave it at that. lets not create The Racist Gas Station with scary truckers in this scenario where we drive to Detroit and try to eat Duck Blood Soup and play punk rock.
win an mp4 player. notice a fat italian man with an iphone.
we got into Hamtramck, which i gather is some sort of suburb of Detroit without actually being in Detroit while still being in Detroit. on the way, i took pictures of the things we passed. Detroit is something that needs to be seen to be understood, and even then it isn’t understood. but Detroit is not some Buzzfeed 30 Cool Buildings In Detroit article – it is a phenomenon and it is a fascinating story of what happens when there are no more stories.
we arrived at The New Dodge Lounge, an accommodating bar of nice people who managed to smoke cigarettes next to a “No Smoking Allowed” sign. we asked them where to go to eat. they told us to go to one of two Polish restaurants. we were in the Polish part of town. The New Dodge Lounge, if you plug it into the Google Search Engine, the first thing that will come up is “New Dodge Lounge Shooting”.
while this is a thing that happens to punk bands, i want you to understand that this seemed like a safe place to be and by no means is this foreshadowing some exciting event.
Dan tried ordering the Duck Blood Soup. the waiter initially left to place the order but then later came back after being informed that the shit took a long time to make and was not ready. in the kitchen were a number of motherly looking women speaking a language i would assume to be polish. we drank large beers and spent money. Rory and I split a meal that was not vegan which i felt would remedy the years of my life where i ate my meal and half my girlfriends meals. it did not.
i left my tour notebook at the restaurant and went back to get it. this is unimportant.
i did it after we went back to the bar and checked in. i discovered a confusing feature of the bathroom involving a plexiglass window showing a duct system. i cant remember if it was in the bar or the polish restaurant and you don’t care anyway.
i am listening to Planes Mistaken For Stars as i write this. i don’t really know why as they’ve never been a favorite – maybe i’m trying to figure out whether or not to rid myself of them. i remember seeing them at The Triple Rock Social Club and noticing the singer had a bandana hanging out of his back pocket, which pissed me off at the time because i regarded it as “some bullshit hipster shit”. i was probably wearing a Mastodon shirt at the time. it was probably 2003.
we milled about and ordered drinks. i dont remember if we got tickets or paid full price, but i remember they were not free. i ordered a tequila and they served it to me with a lemon. i asked for a lime. i kept getting lemons. maybe this is why Detroit is crumbling into the sea and Robocop moved to Miami.
Spit Spewing Snakes played. i noted that they were super tight, funny, thrashy, and interesting. they were dan’s favorite band of the night and in retrospect, i have to agree.
then Hood Rat played. it was two guys and i got the impression they were a newer band and touring for fun, more or less. it sounded like Venom. they were fine. nice guys. i think we got asked to play with them when they were around the twin cities and we declined for some reason.
i also got to meet Amado from Bill Bondsmen, one of my current favorite hardcore bands. he had a distro at the club, set up. Andy from Minus 9, one of my current favorite whatever-the-fuck-you-wanna-call them bands was also there. we played with Minus 9 back in Minneapolis and in Appleton once and have since sworn an oath to never play after them again because of how good they are.
we played after arguing with the sound tech about some shit. maybe we argued about playing the slot that Hood Rat played, or maybe we argued about playing last. either way, i’ve grown pretty resentful of “sound techs” in general. my notes say that during our set, i made fun of someone for texting and threw her cigarettes across the room. i also kicked a cigarette out of some dudes hand who may or may not have tried to tackle/hit me subsequently. and i complained about how someone pissed all over the toilet seat and that i couldn’t take a shit before we played. afterwards people were very complimentary and nice, including two weird girls that a few people suspected could have been prostitutes because they were overdressed and too attractive to be at this show. Rory got one of their numbers and she texted him a lot.
then Raw Dogs, the obvious local heroes of the establishment, played a lengthy set.
the tall freak in the front, grabbing his head is perfect patrick. i dont remember shit about Raw Dogs other than they were the most rockn’roll band i’ve seen in a long time and at least one of them was wearing a wig. they were absolutely fucking ridiculous and pretty good. all members of Brain Tumors moshed during their set due to drunkenness and out of respect. according to what i have written down, Raw Dogs were GENOCIDE SS, DIMEBAG GUITAR, MOTORHEAD, MEGADETH. but i doubt any of this is correct.
we were also given a shitload of free food that couldnt be given to a homeless shelter or something. it was nuts. i ate a chicken sandwich from Wendy’s that couldnt have been fresher than 8 hours old – i went around and asked everyone at the club and they all told me they had eaten it all drunk and turned out fine as well. so i went for it.
we sold merch to some very nice people. we sold merch to one of the bartenders, even. some dude told me about having sex with one of his friends mom – the kid whose cigarette i kicked out of his hand. i noticed the urinal dividers swung, which i had never seen. Rory hurt his thumb and fell off a table while people cheered. i played Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” two times on the jukebox and the girl i made fun of for texting apologized to me. the bartender played Nine Inch Nails and Dragonforce and cheered when i confronted her on it. someone vandalized the bathroom.
joel talked to a progressive racist (?) and the dudes from Raw Dogs invited us to go sleep at their practice space which was about 40 minutes away. it was good because we got to see how fucked up and decimated Detroit is. we got to their practice space and it was good because i got to laugh at the practice space door of The Black Dahlia Murder (who hate me from the internet) and Joel accidentally wandered into the practice space of this shitty band called I See Stars and spooked one of them. I fixed a hamburger cowboy with a sharpie.
after realizing that Hood Rat was sleeping in the practice space and that people planned on partying there all night long, we left. i dragged Rory away from some girl who was professing her love for him and talked to some dude about Anal Cunt and the Village People on the way out.
we drove away in the direction of Cincinnati to find a hotel while i listened to Joel and Dan argue about fucking Ron Paul, despite neither one of them supporting him. at the hotel, Joel opened his Marvel trading cars that he got from Max in Chicago.
